


Confluence

by ars_belli



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 09:43:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4474589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_belli/pseuds/ars_belli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If the gods were good, Lannister would eventually stagger off in search of his army and drown in the river.  But when were the Gods ever good?  Neither the old gods nor the new had saved her Ned.  <i>Or Robb</i>, but she pushed that thought away.</p><p>The battle of the Whispering Wood does not go as planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confluence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redcandle17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redcandle17/gifts).



> I signed up for this challenge assuming that Martin's books were very similar to the TV show and was perplexed to find that show!Catelyn and book!Catelyn are almost precise opposites. (On the bright side, at least I started reading the books.) I really hope that I've steered more towards book!Catelyn here, but do let me know if there are some aspects that need polishing.

"My Lady, we should move."  
Ser Desmond tugged softly at her sleeve.  An hour ago, the forest had been quiet, no sounds but the wind through the trees which gave the Whispering Wood its name.  Perhaps she was thinking of two hours ago, or six.  Catelyn could no longer have said when the ambush had begun, save that the first cries of "Stark!" and "Lannister!" had been before the sky had lightened from Targaryen black to Tully blue.  
"My Lady!  We must go now!"  
Her guards had mounted up already.  Her foot caught the nearer stirrup and she vaulted onto the horse in a manner which would have made her old septa faint.  It was hard to click her tongue at her mount, nudging it into a reckless canter.  Her throat had gone dry at the implications of their sudden decampment.  Every hoof-beat echoed her firstborn's name, thumping like the heavy drum of her heart.   _He ought to have given me the twenty men I requested.  If half these others had been alongside him, would my Robb still be alive?_  The valley became less precipitous as they rode, but the trees were thicker here, a skeletal tangle of branches to catch at her face and a thick carpet of wet leaves to trip her horse.  But she was a Northern beast, sure-footed and unafraid to leap the thickets of nettles and brambles.  Catelyn hadn't even given the horse a name.  
"Dismount!"  
The whisper seemed to travel halfway across the valley.  Nonetheless, Catelyn swung down from the saddle.  She tethered her horse to a hazel tree, pointed away from the bottleneck which ought to have been such a useful trap.  The shouts were closer here.  
"Are we in retreat?" she muttered to no-one in particular.  
"Someone is, m'Lady."  
One of the squires gestured back the way they had come.  
"Hard to tell whom, so it seemed a good idea to get out of the way," the youth whispered.  
Ser Rodrik Cassel glared at him over the rim of his shield.  The elderly knight took the rear, while the Riverlands knight took the lead.  Their shields closed around her like the crypts of Winterfell.  Last night's nettle tea sloshed miserably in her empty stomach.  Her boots slithered on wet leaves in all the colours of flame.  Mutely, she followed Ser Desmond a little way through the wood, into the shadow of a lightning-blasted oak.  They had left the bulk of the party behind with the horses, their noise and smell swallowed by the woods.  There was a fine vantage point here, a mossy outcrop commanding the valley floor, yet well-concealed.  If only they had had some archers…  
"We cannot hide our horses, but we can hide you, m'Lady, and perhaps a knight to assist you."  
Ser Desmond indicated a narrow gap in the bark of the sprawling, hollow tree.  Its bulk loomed above her head like the Lion's Mouth of Casterly Rock.  Ser Rodrik placed a hand on her arm, gesturing with his sword.  
"Someone had the same idea," he muttered.  
A battered helm lay in the shadow of the roots.  Its presumed owner lay crumpled further down the slope.  For a long moment, Catelyn saw her eldest daughter in the long auburn hair, and her youngest in the tenacious grasp of his sword.  The nameless squire crept downhill and poked at the man with the tip of his sword.  When the sole response was a weak groan, the youth stripped the man of swordbelt and cloak.  He picked up a shield with the burning tree of House Marbrand on it, abandoning his own white sunburst on black for the evidently heavier shield.  She could find little comfort in the sight of a fallen foe.  What pragmatism had been self-evident in the Mountains of the Moon now tugged at her nerves in something close to disgust.  The youth scrambled back to the small retinue, hands full of sword and cloak.  He handed them to her.  Feeling an utter fool, she buckled on the sword, then swung the smoke-grey garment across her shoulders.  She half-expected Littlefinger to burst from a thicket astride the mule Balerion, waving his tourney sword and with Lysa's beribboned Meraxes on his heels.   _I thought that my days playing at Visenya were long gone.  At least my Dark Sister is live steel now, in place of wood._   Yet her hands no longer shook when she slipped into the ruined oak.  
"You won't feel an idiot when the worst comes, my Lady," whispered Ser Rodrik.  
The old knight's voice was a comfort.  Then Ser Rodrik reached a hand to tug at his missing whiskers and the doubt returned in full force.  


The worst came with the sunlight.  She had expected death to arrive in a clatter of hooves and shouting men: not alone, whispering in grief.  
"Addam."  
That was not the voice of anyone in her party.  Ignoring Ser Rodrik's glare, she slithered across the moss to find a suitable gap in the bark.  There were chinks wide as arrow slits, yet none faced the right direction.  Finally, she squeezed into the narrow entrance to the tree, just in time to glimpse an armoured shape two trees away.  
"Addam," hissed the voice.  
It was the Kingslayer's voice, surely.  Or was every tall figure in lion-crested helm and red cloak suddenly Jaime Lannister, thanks to her nerves?  Rodrik tugged at her cloak, trying to encourage her back to the shadows.  She paid no heed.  The grey fabric rendered her almost invisible (aided by the brownish-red blotches that she did her best not to see).  Catelyn put her eyes back to the bark.  The soldier had slid down towards the valley, away from them.  He slumped against a sapling with a groan.  Surely this was a ruse.  Surely he could hear the blood rushing in her veins as loud as the Trident's rapids.  Yet the foe set down his sword and removed his helm.   _Gods be good!_  Jaime Lannister sat not ten feet from her, undoing his gauntlets with his teeth.  He tugged at the mailed gloves and flung them on the forest floor.  Then his long fingers brushed the eyelids closed on the corpse.  
"I can't bury you, old friend.  No time."  
Despite his haste, the knight did nothing but cradle the corpse's head in his beautiful hands.  If the gods were good, Lannister would eventually stagger off in search of his army and drown in the river.  But when were the gods ever good?  Neither the old gods nor the new had saved her Ned.   _Or Robb_ , but she pushed that thought away.   _I came to send my husband's bones to Winterfell, must I set my firstborn beside him in the crypts?_  Her children did not even have effigies yet.  It was another item to attend to besides the arrival of the Frey wards and the appointment of a new master of horse.  
"Kingslayer!"  
The laughing shout found her staring blankly at a patch of lichen.  Catelyn's eyes had wandered with her attention.  
"Yield!"  
She put her eyes to the gap again.  Lannister sat quite motionless, the young squire behind him with a sword at his throat.   _Seven Hells, the stupid, reckless—_  Yet she saw the knight make no move for his sword, slowly raising his empty hands.  The Kingslayer shifted, uncrossing his legs before manoeuvring to a kneeling position.  His fingers seemed frozen in mid-air.  
"May I stand?" Lannister asked.  
"Slowly, if you must.  Move your hands and I'll slit your throat."  
His opponent's voice hadn't yet broken.  Lannister laughed softly.  
"When I was your age, I dreamed of capturing the Smiling Knight.  I would have done the same thing."  
He wobbled into an ungainly squat, cutting himself on the sword's edge.  The squire moved the blade a fraction further from the Kingslayer's throat.  In a heartbeat, the knight's fingers closed around the squire's pauldrons and yanked forwards, while his legs uncoiled like a spring.  The sword went flying.  So did the poor squire.  He scrambled to his feet and bolted towards the safety of the hollow.  Meanwhile, the Kingslayer scrabbled for his sword amongst the leaves, hauled himself upright using the sapling and started after him.  Catelyn snapped her face back into the tree so fast that she fell.  
"Not here, stupid boy…"  
She stared at the canopy overhead.  Fear had made her limbs heavy.  For all that she was the Lady of Winterfell, she seemed unable to rise, to die standing.  Something in her could hardly blame the poor youth.  Ser Rodrik's hands slid under her arms and hauled her to her feet.  She stumbled to the far side of the tree without being asked.  Not that it mattered.  Winterfell's master-at-arms was not past his time, had even bested the Hound during King Robert's visit.  But what good was he against a White Cloak, reputedly trained by the Sword of the Morning?  She fervently wished that Bryden were here.  Had her uncle not soundly thrashed Jaime Lannister when he had been new to his spurs?  Or better yet, Barristan the Bold; or his predecessor, old Ser Gerold Hightower, for Hoster had told a hundred stories of how his younger brother had wanted nothing more than to become as fine a knight as the White Bull.  Catelyn set her jaw at the metal whisper of Ser Rodrik's draw.  She would not spend her last moments like the Princess Naerys, hidden away and praying for the return of Prince Aemon the Dragonknight.  Suddenly there was no need for silence, and hoofbeats and shouting had come to herald death after all.  
"Karstark!   _Karstark!_ "  
The squire was Lord Karstark's youngest, then.  From the way his lordship was bellowing, he had one son fewer.  
"Seven bloody Hells, Arnolf, get back here!"  
The Greatjon's roar sounded as sweet as the fabled singers of old Valyria.  And then she laughed aloud:  
"The king!  Stay with the king!"  


There was a soft press of fur into her face.  Catelyn sneezed violently.  She untangled herself from the direwolf, which snoozed on without complaint.  Grey Wind, Robb had called him.   Eyes still closed, she ran her scarred fingers cautiously across her throat.  She could almost feel the dagger there and the scratch of Jaime Lannister's stubble against her cheek.   _Had it not been for the wolf…_  Her eyes opened to the glare of the setting sun.  Robb's wolf was evidently doing triple duty as hot water bottle, guard and pillow, since her room had none of them.  However, it did have a fine view of the Red Fork.  The window-seat formed the point of the triangular room, upholstery just as worn as she recalled.  In a fit of nostalgia, she clambered onto the sill, staring out into the riverlands like a lovesick maid espying her champion.  While pikemen tore down the lion standards with the tips of their weapons, the light infantry were still taking prisoners.  From the battlements flew the direwolf of Stark and the trout of her own House.  She craned her neck, leaning out towards the Trident.  Siege towers on both sides of the river were aflame, as if the sun were setting at every point of the compass.  
"Lady Catelyn Tully!" bellowed a familiar voice.  "Have the years made a Stark of you after all?  Get inside that window at once young lady!"  
"Uncle!" she shouted down, waving at a filthy figure below.  
The Blackfish grinned at her.  
"I'll tell you everything at dinner, little Cat!"  
He waved in return and vanished into the chaos.  She withdrew inside the window, remaining perched on the sill.  When had she last been scolded by her uncle?  That has been Jaime Lannister's fault too, she recalled.  Then again, Petyr Baelish might not have been clouted "accidentally" by a punt pole and fallen in the river, had he been more polite about their visitor's encounter with the Smiling Knight.  
_The demon's opponent was young, brave and true,_  
_When the knights had all fallen, the squire fought through,_  
_Until Simon Toyne's hopes died aborning,_  
_With the coming of the Sword of the Morning._  
Having forgotten all except the chorus, Catelyn settled for whistling.  The autumn sun warmed her face.  Even behind the usual long banks of cloud it had more welcome ferocity than the height of the Northern summer.  She ought to be up searching for her son.  Yet she was home.  The wolf settled onto her lap like the immense, lazy tabby which Minisa Whent had brought to Riverrun when she had wed Lord Hoster.  Cautiously, she reached out a hand to scratch behind its ears.  
"Consider that my thanks, Grey Wind."  
Their mother had promised the two of them kittens, once.  When the old tabby had finally littered, Catelyn had announced herself to be too old for such fancies—and the little ball of fur would be cold in Winterfell!  Lysa, on the other hand…  Her sister had taken the Blackfish's jokes to heart and insisted on her own kitten as part of her dowry.  Grey Wind's wet nose nuzzled the scars on her palm.  Thankfully it had wiped Jaime Lannister's blood into the rushes first.  Eventually the direwolf tired of being treated like a holdfast-pet.  It leaped from her lap and tugged at a corner of her skirts with its teeth.  Catelyn rose from her window seat with a sigh.  
"Lead on, then!  I promise to be more co-operative than the Kingslayer."  


"Lady Catelyn, the gods are good to give you back to us again!"  
A guard whom she did not recognise stood to attention at her approach.  
"My thanks," she replied, "but surely you are too young to remember when I was last here."  
"Aye, m'Lady.  Lord Hoster tells stories, though…"  
The swordsman was suddenly fascinated by his reflection in his boots.  Unfortunately for him, there was a large smudge of polish on the left little toe.  
"…sometimes he doesn't know who sits by his bedside, so m'Lord addresses us as if we were the Blackfish or Lady Minisa or m'Lord Edmure."  
Guilt bubbled into her stomach.  Ought she have seen to her father before her son?  Either way, she had no suitable response.  The guard scratched at his jaw, despite the fact that his stubble was more suited to an apricot.  Then again, young boys had bested seasoned warriors before, and not only in the songs.  
"I will see to Lord Hoster later," she decided.  "Is my son within?"  
"Aye, m'Lady.  Would—would it please you to leave the wolf outside?"  
She nodded.  Robb's wolf made her feel Tully even when it licked her face playfully like a dog: a creature of the North even more than the Old Gods and the weirwood tree.  The young man stood aside.  The wolf bounded through the door anyway.  She heard the old Maester yelp like he hadn't since she and Lysa had snuck their compulsory and much-dreaded codfish oil into his morning tonic.  
"Grey Wind, sit.  No, _sit_!" her son barked.  "Not on the Kingslayer!"  
"Jealous, Stark?" Lannister mocked. "Should I expect you to lick my wounds next?"  
Lady Catelyn smoothed her skirts carefully, preparing to do battle with the lion of Lannister again.  The door closed heavily behind her.  To her credit, she did not so much as quirk an eyebrow at the scene before her.  Well, perhaps her mouth hardened a little…  
"Grey Wind, here," she called cautiously.  
Much to her surprise, the wolf obeyed.  She scratched it behind the ears again.  It sat guard by the door, dark blood glinting on its teeth, tongue lolling.  The Kingslayer's panting was nearly as fast as the wolf's, harsh erratic breaths that clouded into the air like smoke from a dragon.  The room was cold, as if the Starks had brought winter with them.  
"My thanks, Lady Catelyn," the prisoner managed.  
"If only the lion would obey you like the direwolf does, my Lady!" a reedy voice interjected.  
She laughed at the sight of the grey-robed figure at the opposite end of the room, instruments clutched to his chest in fright.  
"Does he not take his medicine, Maester?" she asked.  
"Oh, the young man is quite as obedient as you and Lysa!  However, boiling wine in that wound may change his mind."  
"It won't, I assure you," his patient interjected.  
Yet a groan escaped as Jaime Lannister craned his neck to look at the wolf.  There was little else that he could do, with his limbs secured firmly to the corners of the four-poster.  A wad of linen covered the pillow supporting the red ruin of his shoulder.  An odd angle of bone marred the fine lines of his bare left leg, while bruises marbled his torso.  
"You will make a very warm cloak and some handsome gloves, direwolf," Lannister snarled. "Possibly a matching hat."  
"Brave words, with you lying there tied up like a boy whore," countered Robb.  
The prisoner's glance moved to Catelyn.  The smile in them now had teeth.  
"How do you know what a whore looks like, boy?  Did Ned Stark bring whomever whelped that bastard of his to Winterfell?"  
"There was no need," her son snapped. "You brought your sister."  
The Kingslayer's long neck snapped around like a Dornish whip.  His spit caught her son right in one blue eye.  Had both of them been green boys all the time, only playing at men?  Thankfully her son held his temper better than he had his wolf.  His next words were soft, cold, empty.  
"If you _ever_ insult my father—"  
"Me?  You insult him, King in the North!  What triumphs have you accomplished recently?  Deluding your lords into thinking that your squabble over Ned Stark's bones has the noble purpose of fighting for independence?  Independence from what: all that free trade which keeps the North propped up by the South; the same laws with which you were so satisfied under Robert; a state religion that you've ignored for years anyway?  Don't tell me that Jon Umber and his ilk are so afraid of one boy king that they need to appoint another!  Yet here you are, callously misleading your bannermen into a slog of a war for the sake of a dead man!  Why—because you are too afraid to fight me in single combat or too afraid of my father to meet him in open battle?"  
The prisoner shifted, shaking his head slightly as if to clear it.  
"Well, it's not as if your smallfolk has anything better to do than dance to your tune around the countryside—Ah, but wait, what's on your banners?  'Winter is Coming,' Stark?  Why, yes it is!  And when winter does come, you're willing to let the entire population of the North—your North, _your Grace_ —starve because you're too proud to let your soldiers return home to the harvest!  Tell me, do you think Ned Stark's spirit is hiding up a tree somewhere, warmed by his son's _noble_ and _virtuous_ actions?"  
The Kingslayer ran out of breath.  His eyes closed.  For a while the only sound was Grey Wind's soft panting.  
"Well, Stark?  It's rude to ignore someone when they ask you a question," he snapped.  
Catelyn gripped her eldest's arm the second he opened his mouth.  He started at her touch.  Robb's eyes met hers and he suddenly looked far too young to wear the iron crown of the Kings of Winter.  Her king swept from the room without a word, motioning his wolf with him.  Catelyn fought the urge to watch him leave.  Yet that left her staring at the Kingslayer himself.  
"Lady Stark," he said wearily.  Warily, it pleased her to note.  
"And you claimed that the battlefield was no place for a woman.  Perhaps it is no place for a tourney knight either."  
One brilliant eye opened.  Had the wolf torn it out, an emerald would have been a dull replacement.  For a moment the maester blocked her view as he moved to the Kingslayer's bedside.  He began to explore the ruined shoulder with a pair of forceps in one hand and a pewter carafe in the other.  Hastily she averted her eyes.  
"You did come looking for me," Lannister murmured.  
"It was my son I sought.  It was merely unfortunate that I found you on the way."  
"He did seem rather keen on the view—" The barb dissolved into a startled yelp as the wine was applied.  Catelyn found her eyes drawn to the motions of his throat as he swallowed curses.  
"This really would be much easier if you took some milk of the poppy!" the maester barked.  
How many times had she heard that, having fallen from a tree or into something submerged in the river and broken this or that?  Catelyn sank to the far edge of the bed.  One hand knotted in the Kingslayer's long curls, so like his sister's, turning his face from the wound.  The other held his own, while the pulse in her wrist fluttered like a trapped moth under his thumb.  
"A—a sword swallower, him?  No wonder his bannermen are keen on the man," Lannister panted.  
"Ah, but of course you aren't, Kingslayer—you act as if the sword had been inserted up the other end," she countered.  
Nothing was further from the truth, with the prisoner flailing at his bonds in pain.  There was a strange beauty in the chaos of his long, tanned limbs fighting to escape the knots.  
"You are too kind, Lady Stark.  I always assumed that you thought my head was up there."  
"I have no interest in the position of your head, provided that it isn't between my legs."  
The slightest twist of a smile flitted about his lips.  The fingers tightened about her wrist.  
"You have caught me rather out of practice, I admit."  
"Admit defeat, you?"  
"When did I say that it was the verbal sparring at which I lacked practice?"  
"The Kingsguard are forbidden from practising the other sort."  
"Fortunate for you that even Lord Stannis concedes my natural talent."  
A laugh burst from her lips.  She had missed the cut-and-thrust of the South, although she would kiss the Crone rather than admit it.  It was a small price to pay to raise her children outside the endless permutations of the game of thrones, in which the smallest of actions was a message to be read, every gesture a lie instead of a truth.   _I left Sansa and Arya there.  In King's Landing, right at the centre of the board, and they have little notion that the game exists, much less how to play…_  
"There!  No more boiling wine, now.  I'll bind it up and check on your progress in the morning.  I think that we have finally found a patient worse than your sister," the maester sniffed.  
This last was directed at Catelyn, although his eyes never wavered from the task of bandaging the wound.  
"Oh, don't leave!  I was just starting to enjoy myself," the prisoner jested.  
This earned a derisive snort from the maester, although Catelyn wasn't entirely certain that the barb was for him.  The Kingslayer's wry smile followed her into the corridor.  So did the muffled groans of pain when he thought himself beyond hearing.  


Uncle Brynden didn't turn up at dinner, not until well after the fish course and the salads and even the haunch of venison.  Even so, Catelyn felt a smile stretching her face.  Had it really been so long that she had forgotten how?  She gestured to the high seat to her right.  It ought to have been Hoster's.  Brynden Tully sat, plucked an onion from her trencher with his fingers like a smallman, and swiped it through her gravy to add insult to ill-manners.  
"Good evening to you too, Uncle!"  
He grinned, wiping his hands on her proffered handkerchief.  
"Vension, was it?  My favourite!  Ah well, I was too well-fed in the Vale anyway," he sighed.  
He waved for ale.  
"I am sorry, little Cat!  I truly was on time for the prayers and the first course, but the pikemen your Robb sent us put paid to that.  I spent all evening chasing our garrison around the inner keep.  Most of the men are drunk, and those that aren't are doing their best to become so!"  
Despite his earlier words, Brynden helped himself to her remaining onion.  He washed it down with a sip of ale.  His lined face brightened.  
"Very fine!  So, the pikemen…They spent all bloody afternoon inventing some new verses to the Rains of Castamere.  Most of them involved the Kingslayer's female relatives, the Kingslayer's sword, and, well, more than a few lines rhymed with your favourite river activity as a child."  
She coughed wine and snatched her handkerchief back to muffle the noise.  
"Brandon would have been impressed, would he?" Catelyn croaked.  
She didn't know what had possessed her to bring that up.  It might have been yesterday that her betrothed had had one cup of wine too many at her sixteenth nameday celebration.  Brandon Stark had seemed determined to list all of the virtues of Lord Hoster's ward that he could, which unfortunately for Petyr had been his skill at deflowering maidens and little else.  Was it such a wonder that the idiot boy had challenged him to a duel within the week?   _Not unlike the boy this morning._  Cat pushed away the thought with her plate.  
"What are you going to do about it?" she asked.  
"Ought I tie them to punt poles in their armour and stick them in the river?  We could have bets on who falls off and drowns first!"  
"Was the singing that poor?" she laughed, only half-jesting.  
He shook his head.  It was not the Kingslayer bothering him, or even the Lannister host that overflowed the dungeons.  Edmure, then or perhaps her father.  She had seen neither of them today, too occupied by taking upon herself all of the duties that ought to have been Lady Minisa's—or better yet, the long-hoped-for Lady Edmure Tully.  Honestly, her brother and her uncle were peas on a most unlikely pod sometimes!  
"Robb wants to hunt down Lord Tywin while he knows nothing of the victory today.  By now the old lion will have realised that he was the victim of a diversionary offensive.  The question is what he will do next: destroy those forces to the last man to protect his rear, or go tearing after his son in the hope that the trap is yet unsprung.  A softer man would take the latter course, but—"  
"—There is naught but stone at the heart of Casterly Rock—" she interjected.  
Brynden nodded.  
"Robb took all of our horse, save a skeleton force of scouts.  If he can ambush the Lannister foot while they are running down the Northmen they defeated, if the Lannister reserves cannot block the pincer attack, if Lord Tywin cannot withdraw from the field of battle, Robb's victory will be total."  
She frowned.  The numbers would be in Lord Tywin's favour, yet they had been so in Ser Jaime's as well.  Was this recklessness her son, or his bannermen?  If the Greatjon were persuasive enough, perhaps Robb had accepted the plan…  The possibilities churned in her stomach like the first course's curd dumplings.  Meanwhile Brynden's call to refill his mug went in vain, as some unfortunate below the salt found himself drenched in ale meant for the high table.   _If only someone had dared to do the same to King Robert when his hands wandered._  Had Robert Baratheon not scorned the queen's bed and her brother's sword and their thrice-damned father so openly, how much of this would have happened?  
"If, if, if!  Eddard Stark's son he may be, but he's acting more like Robert Baratheon," she chided.  
Her uncle attempted to hide a grin of approval behind the rim of his tankard.  Catelyn fought down the urge to glow too openly.  Most warriors mistook caution for timidness and patience for indecision, Ned had told her once.  Not him, of course—which was perhaps why he had buried three foes and five friends in the mountains of Dorne, even after the war had seemed won.  She and Ned had barely known each other then, save for glimpses at Harrenhal.  Not even a dance!  Both her wolves had favoured the same weakness.  For all that, she knew in her bones that Jon Snow was not Brandon's. Might that have been a lesser burden? Would she have married Benjen, had she been greeted at Winterfell by a sword and an orphan instead of a wet nurse and a bastard—or thrown herself from its tallest tower?   _Ser Arthur would not have stolen my firstborn—yet Ned had taken Jon and men named him honourable still. _  
"Robb cannot refuse Lord Tywin if he wishes to parlay," she ventured.  "If he offers single combat in place of battle…"  
The Blackfish's mouth didn't move, yet she read the smile in his features.  
"The lion of Casterly Rock cannot hide behind the Mountain, not with Ser Jaime captured.  Lord Tywin can be goaded into fighting himself, if I have a say in the matter."  
A little wine loosened her throat.  However, it did not banish the image of a gilded morningstar caving in her firstborn's skull.  For the first time, she regretted Ned's fierce insistence on the code of Stark honour.  Surely her uncle had some cunning plan to keep Robb from answering Lord Tywin's challenge?  
"Will you see my father before you go?" she pleaded.  
"Hoster!  He slept through the entire siege!"  
Yet her uncle made no move to stop her as she left the hall for her father's solar.  
__

She dreamed of the woods again.  She was back in the hollow of the huge, dead oak, completely alone.  As in life, she angled side-on to peer through the gap in the bark, waiting.  She saw the Kingslayer and the squire and the dead knight.  The squire ran towards her shelter, swifter than his foe.  She lost sight of the pair as she scrambled back into the illusory refuge of the lightening-struck tree.  
"Kitten," choked a voice.  
It was Petyr, somehow.  The squire's armour and the knight's sword in his ribs, yes, but it was the spry boy from the Fingers who staggered headlong into her arms.  They sank to the moss together.  His breath smelled of mint as it washed weaker and weaker over her cheeks.  This wasn't right.  Jaime had always lost at hide-and-seek; he'd never had the patience to find anyone, least of all Petyr, who seemed to vanish into thin air the minute their eyes were closed.  She reached out to brush closed his eyes.  They were grey, but not his.  Stark eyes.  They matched the armour, pale grey with silver clasps, armour that she had last seen at Harrenhal—  
"Brandon," she cried.  
—and just as at Harrenhal, his arm slid around her neck, pulling her close to plant kisses up her throat, across her chin, into her mouth, before he growled "Ashara."  Suddenly his tongue tasted of ashes.  Horrified, she watched as her betrothed turned to soot and dissolved in the wind.  The fine armour melted, bubbling, sinking into the earth.  Only the spurs remained, a molten blob of gold that dribbled into a thin circlet.  The gold grew hands that reached for her, towards all the secret places that she had shared with Ned alone—  
She bolted.  
Catelyn stumbled to her feet and dived for the narrow gap into the light.  Just as she thought that she might break free, she felt a strong hand knot in her hair and yank her backwards.  
"Kitten," murmured an amused voice in her ear, "The battlefield is hardly a place for a lady."  
"This is most ungallant, _Kingslayer_ ," she snapped.  "Release me at once."  
Her hands were still free.  With her left, she reached up to grapple with the hand clutching her hair.  It only made him pull her more firmly against the armour, neck arched backwards so that her head rested on a gilded pauldron.  She wanted to laugh with relief.  This was a nightmare she had survived already.  
"I do promise to release you, my Lady.  However, not at once.  As soon as I am safely distant from your wolf cub and his followers outside, I will let you go without harming a single hair on your head," the Kingslayer promised.  
Her right hand closed upon the sword beneath her cloak.  She twisted wildly, hoping that the flailing would cover the action of drawing the sword.  A dagger bit against her throat, stilling her instantly.  
"Drop the sword, kitten.  Or mayhaps I ought to call you Visenya, or Rhaenyra?"  
Catelyn let the sword fall to the earth.  Was this how the Half-Year Queen had felt, captured on her own lands, in front of her own son?  Yet outside there was no-one.  She could not see Robb mounted on the Greatjon's horse, nor Dacey Mormont still holding the morningstar which had so neatly struck the gilded sword from the Kingslayer's hands, nor the Greatjon himself, peering into the tree whither the Kingslayer had fled.  There was no confrontation, no shouting, no helpless look in her son's eyes as their foe made good his escape thanks to his mother.  She swallowed against the blade.  There was only the sound of the wind and the water and all the familiarity of home.  
"The river sounds like to be that way.  Shall we, my Lady?"  
"Why, ser?"  
"So that I may slit your throat and deposit your shapely body in the Trident, of course," he laughed.  
At least he no longer pulled her hair in the direction of travel like Rickon directing a pony by its mane.  Unlike in life they walked in silence, a glided arm around her shoulders as if in courtship, were it not for the blade in his fingers.  She waited for the wolf.  No grey form bounded from the trees above them.  Catelyn had never seen the lunge, had only heard the sounds of the huge wolf's jaws clamping around the Kingslayer's shoulder and the wet, tearing noises that followed.  When they reached the Red Fork, it was not the autumn torrent she had seen that morning, but the same meandering spring tributary into which Lysa had shoved her as a young lady.  They had both soaked their dresses, clogged their new hairstyles with algae and swallowed enough riverwater to be unable to eat at dinner.  It had been Lysa who had fled mortified, while Cat had greeted Ser Brandon and Ser Jaime with all the dignity of the highborn lady whom she most certainly had not resembled.  Perhaps the wolf was not coming because Robb had not yet been born.  If so, then Jaime Lannister had not yet slain the king and discarded his honour.  
"Ser, you will release me now."  
A commanding tone came hard with the metal cool against her skin.  Surely that cold was the cause of her weakness, not the heat of the knight's words, words breathed so closely into her ear that he tasted her more than spoke to her.  
"Oh?" he chuckled against the shell of her ear, "Isn't this what knights are supposed to do?  Ride off with a fair maid into the sunset?  Bring them before their father and marry with his blessing despite the difference in station?  Produce miniatures of themselves so that they might live happily ever after in perpetuity?"  
His laugh made her stumble, just enough to drip red down her throat.  
"But as my Lady wishes," he murmured.  
The dagger left her skin.  She gaped, even as he walked backwards and open-handed to lean against a tree, watching her.  Catelyn didn't move.  Not even when he slid his tongue from between those perfect white teeth and licked the blade clean.  He was like a lion with a mouse.  He would run faster, even in the armour.  He was armed and she had nothing but her wits.  So she walked back to him.  
"Do you imagine that I am as innocent as my daughters?  You have no intention of letting me go, do you?"  
He smiled.  She had to stretch onto her toes to kiss his mouth.  He gave her Brandon's kisses, not Eddard's, all the fire that a young maid might want, none of the love required by a married woman.  She could swim, if she could remove her gown without him noticing the ruse.  He would drown in all that golden plate.  
"Catelyn," he purred.  
Then the dagger slid light as a lover's breath down her spine, cutting away her garments.  She slid her palms down the stubble on his cheeks, eyes closed.  She didn't want to see whether the dream had given her the figure of her maidenhood or her real body, waist thickened by childbirth.  The Kingslayer bent his mouth to her throat to lap at the cut he had made.  Was this what her child had seen?  With which hand had he crippled her Bran, the one at her breasts or between her legs?  She laced her fingers behind his neck, pressed her thumbs into his windpipe and _squeezed_.  
"Catelyn," he moaned.  
Seven Hells, didn't it feel good, while his gasps came faster into her mouth and his kisses more ragged and she choked the life from him?  His fingers clawed frantically inside her, whence Bran had slid eight years ago.  She clenched around them as tight as her hands curled around his neck.  He would die like this, yes, in just a few more heartbeats, and had any revenge felt so sweet?  Then her release crashed over her.  It tore the strength from her fingers and wrenched a scream of rage from her throat.  
"Catelyn," he repeated, louder.  
And that was wrong, why, the figure before her barely had enough air to breathe.  Barely, but enough, and the injustice of it all made her own throat feel tight.  


She woke with tears on her cheeks.  
"Lady Catelyn, I apologise for disturbing your…rest."  
It was the voice—the same voice from her dream.  She yawned, dashing the tears from her face.  Her father's Myrish carpet was soft under her side, but the cold from the stone floor seeped through despite it.  She sat up.  Moonlight illuminated the chaise behind her, driving a long wedge of light into Hoster's bed.  Her pillows lay in the rushes, knocked from the chaise when she had fell.  Her scroll had survived unscathed on the side table.  Ah, yes, she had only thought to close her eyes a little before unwinding the next chapter.  
"Mother have mercy, I ought not to have had so much wine at the feast.  It gives me nightmares," she mumbled.  
"You ought not to have read about Queen Helaena before bed, my Lady.  One assumes that Blood and Cheese would give any mother nightmares."  
She laughed.  The sight of the Kingslayer sitting careless and unchained on her chaise, dressed only in breeches and tunic, certainly qualified as one.  
"It appears that I have woken into another."  
His hand was cool in hers as he pulled her to her feet.  
"Blame your precious Blackfish for that!  He vanished in hot pursuit of his cavalry, leaving Edmure to defend Riverrun."  
"I take it that my brother was no match for your father."  
She brushed past him, swallowing her rage.  Even she could see the ease with which the trap might be sprung.  A drunken garrison; a careless guard admitting the Ghiscari horse.  Might the Blackfish have saved them?  A sip of the lemonwater on the table helped a little.  Catelyn thanked the Seven that the glass did not tremble in her hands.  Lannister did nothing.  She moved to sit beside her father, taking his hand.  He groaned in his sleep, skin as dry as old parchment.  Catelyn brushed a dribble from the corner of her father's mouth.  
"Speaking of whom, he is most eager to make your acquaintance," the Kinglsayer remarked softly.  
"At this hour?" she snapped, incredulous. "May I at least dress?"  
"My lady," he remarked dryly, "Lord Tywin requires your presence _promptly_.  I hardly think that he would notice if you came wearing nothing at all."  
She felt herself rise from her lord father's bed all the same.  He was curled into the pillow, still clutching her hand.  Gently, she reclaimed it.   _Family, duty, honour._  Family came first, but which; son or father, husband or brother?  


Had she realised that Jaime had offered his arm as a crutch rather than a courtesy, she never would have taken it.  Most of his weight rested upon her instead of his bad leg.  Her light shift greedily soaked up the sweat from his feverish skin.  He staggered down the winding stair separating her father's bedchamber and solar like a drunk.  Would she have long to savour the sight of those long golden limbs askew on the landing, before the crack of his skull against the stone stained his hair with his house colours, alerting the guards below?  
"My word, is this one as fiery as her long, red hair?" leered the rightmost guard.  
"It's auburn, idiot.  Blue eyes and red-brown hair, that's the Tully look," snapped the left.  
"You'll both get blue eyes if you don't behave yourselves," barked Ser Jaime.  "Blue and black."  
"Enter," called a voice.  
The rightmost guard seized the distraction to blow her a kiss over the Kingslayer's injured shoulder.  Catelyn thought longingly of the politeness of the young man earlier that day.  Yet another guard opened the door from the inside.  Standing at the threshold, she felt six again, about to be punished for stealing sweets and dipping her sister's braids in her inkwell.  
"Lady Catelyn, Jaime, good evening."  
"Father," Lannister acknowledged.  
He led Catelyn to stand in front of Lord Hoster's desk and the figure seated behind it.  She did not remember Lord Tywin well, though she recalled the serving girls gossiping that he had looked old even when he was young.  Something to do with his wife's death—an image which lanced a sharp ache of _Ned_ into her chest.  Hoster's wan face swam in her mind.   Now the Lord of Casterly Rock looked young even when he was old.  
"My Lord of Lannister," she greeted him formally.  
"Jaime tells me that you have treated him well," Lord Tywin noted.  
His pen scratched across the parchment.  The candlelight gleamed off his bald head.  When he raised his glance from his papers, Catelyn saw that he had a beard to make Prince Maekar Targaryen proud.  In silver and gold, the only two things which gave a Lannister any satisfaction.  
"I hope that I have given him no cause for complaint, my Lord."  
The Warden of the West relinquished his place behind her father's desk.  He possessed a figure to make the warrior-dragonlord proud as well, she noted.  Was this how the Kingslayer might look in old age?  The magnificent crimson bed-robe he wore did him no disservice, for all that it betrayed that he had been awoken as swiftly as she.  Her heart jumped at the hope that the Lord of Casterly Rock might be a lesser opponent when befuddled by sleep.  
"My Lady, permit me to be direct with you.  I—and perhaps Ser Jaime—require your services this night."  
"My _services_?"  
Catelyn forcibly cut herself short.  It was discourteous enough that she had presented herself clad only in shift and cloak, instead of the gown that ought to lie between.  There was little point in adding to his advantage by howling like the direwolf on her son's sigil.  
"What would my Lord have of me?" she asked, as calmly as if they were discussing the weather.  
"Why, whatever my Lady consents to give.  I see no reason in any further…use of force."  
Her jaw seemed to have contracted greyscale and petrified of its own accord.  She stood mute, waiting.  
"Come, sweetling, all we ask is that you kneel on that fine silk carpet before the hearth and do as you are bid," Jaime murmured in her ear, all too eerily similar to her dream.  
How could she consent to give anything, when she held no power at all, not to dislodge Jaime from her arm, nor to calm the quickening of her pulse, nor even to quell thoughts of her recent dream?  
"Does my Lady prefer to do her duty in the barracks, before half my household guard?" Lord Tywin demanded.  
_The iron fist in the velvet glove._   What price her honour, if it saved her blood?  She walked to her father's prized silk carpet, tugging Jaime with her.  She sank to her knees in silence.  The golden knight went to lean against the mantel, looming over her from five paces away.   _Let him watch_ , she thought savagely.  How often had she encountered this at Harrenhal, the defeated knights proving their virility by bedding someone close to their opponent?   _Brandon Stark, you reckless fool._  Brandon had taught her how to use her mouth; but how could she have competed with the Lady Ashara, with all the sultry exoticism of the Dornish and the haunting, violet eyes of House Dayne?  
Her wandering mind was halted by the slide of Lord Tywin's finger down her jaw.  
"Such defiance," he observed.  
Were it anyone else, Catelyn would have read amusement in his voice.  His hands knotted in her hair, tilting her face to meet his eyes.  They were pale, so unlike the deep green of his son's.  As girls, she and Lysa had sighed that Ser Jaime's eyes were deep enough in which to drown.  Lord Tywin's had no such depths in which to hide her sins.  
"Will you say the words?" he intoned.  
"Words?" she blurted.  
"Your father is insensible from milk of the poppy, your brother languishes in a similar state in his own dungeon—"  
The meaning was plain: she would dance to Lord Tywin's tune, willingly or no.  
"I told Crakehall that we wanted him alive, so Ser Lyle merely _half_ -brained him with a morningstar.  Bloody idiot," Jaime interjected.  
"— _Thank you_ , Jaime—and your uncle is off Gods-know-where chasing after your son."  
That slip of the tongue was another slight hope, as light and deadly as the sword she had held that very morning.   _As useless…_   Nonetheless, she found that breathing no longer sent a lance of fear though her chest, now that she was certain that the two armies had missed each other in their forced manoeuvres.  
"My Lord, I gave up any claim to Riverrun when I married Eddard Stark."  
"Yet there are no other male claimants, as you well know."  
She nodded.  
"That does not change the fact that the Tully garrison will hardly take orders from a woman."  
"The Tully bannermen will, I think."  
His dismissal was something terrifyingly close to a smile.  


The trappings of her old room should not have felt a prison.  They had not been so since her betrothal to Brandon Stark.  Not one lifetime ago but two, now that her children were entering marriage pacts themselves.  The though of Arya marrying a Frey sprang to mind.  Gods, Arya would sooner have married Laenor Velaryon!  
"Have I been in this room before?" the Kingslayer asked.  
He leaned against the door.  The single candle lighted his face more than the bedchamber.  
"If you were in any of our chambers, it would have been Lysa's," she responded tartly.  
"I think not, my Lady.  I, for one, am not in the habit of trysts with Petyr Baelish."  
His smile flashed white in the darkness.  The edge to it was too much like the dagger his catspaw had used on her Bran.  No, not his: such a man would have done the deed himself.  This was like playing cyvasse without the screens removed, with only her own moves visible.  
"I mislike the implications in that."  
Even as she stared him down, she knew that the gesture was the wrong move.  He had found a chink in her armour.  He would drive the blade in, sharp and bright and wet with blood.  
"What implication?" he smiled brightly, "Did I ask you to show me what Littlefinger taught you?"  
The crack of her hand across his face would be as elegant and succinct as any spoken retort.  Catelyn restrained herself.   _I am no she-wolf of Winterfell.  I am a Tully of Riverrun._  Instead she walked to the bed, requiring no candle to light the path in her memory.  
"Would you care to come here and find out?"  
"Sadly, I must return to my father.  Another time, perhaps?" he asked dryly.  
The corners of his mouth turned upwards in mirth at her frown.  Lysa had never required light to find her bed, whenever her dreams outweighed the terrors of child-stealing river sprites lurking in the darkness.  Littlefinger had taken to hiding under her bed, to jump out and scare the pair of them witless.  Brandon had been here, for half a night's worth of stolen kisses and touches.  Jaime had carried her to bed too, when she had fallen in her cups, but the newly-dubbed knight had never taken her favour from his damsel in distress.  She looked at the figure by the door, limned in candlelight and sins.  She did not want to be left alone in this room with her childhood, she thought suddenly.  
"What will Lord Tywin do with Hoster, when my father wakes?  He is not fit to travel to Casterly Rock."  
"I left them discussing dower, of all things."  His face clouded.  "It was as if twenty years had vanished."  
"Perhaps Edmure is to be spared after all," she ventured.  
The laugh rumbled from his chest, uncannily like his sigil.  
"It was your dower they were discussing."  
Heat flushed her cheeks.  So did the glow from the candle.  How had her foe approached so soundlessly?  The bedfamre creaked as he sat carefully beside her.  
"I am—" she began, not entirely sure how to finish.  
"—Eddard Stark's widow?  The only female claimant to this very castle?"  
"My brother—"  
"Should he live, which would be most inconvenient for House Lannister…although Aunt Genna may find him marginally more suitable than her current Frey dullard.  No, my father would prefer to wed a Tully to a Lannister rather than the other way around.  We hardly lack golden lions looking for a lioness."  
He collapsed onto the sheets with a sigh.  She hastily rescued the candle from his hand before he could set them both ablaze.  Her veins already seemed filled with wildfire, only the slightest heat required to spark her rage at the old lion's callousness.  
"Do I get a choice?" she spat. "No, I assume not."  
"Perhaps you'll marry me," Lannister laughed.  "Poor Tywin!  He likes the sight of me in the white cloak as much as the rest of Westeros. Or Tyrion!"  
No, _no_.  Dwarves were the stock of comic troupes at weddings, hired to remove the bride's smallclothes at the bedding with their teeth; or imps sent to crawl between mothers' legs and rip the child from the womb; or instruments of public cuckolding to humiliate an enemy husband.  They were not husbands themselves, never.  Her hands curled into fists in the sheets.  She would have torn them to pieces, had she found the strength somewhere.  The careful motion of the Kingslayer's sword hand through her hair caught her by surprise.  
"He's none the worse for being a little short, truly!"  
Was that hurt or petulance beneath the jesting tone?  
"The Smiling Knight was four feet and ten, no-one made mock of him," Jaime continued.  
Neither, she decided.  It was reproach, from a man like him!  She resisted the temptation to lie down, to permit his fingers to reach her scalp instead of teasing through her tresses.  
"Supposing I do have some choice.  What would be your advice?"  
"Honestly?"  
The lazy, arrogant drawl slid into her ears as smoothly as the arm curling around her waist.  He pulled sharply.  Catelyn let out an undignified yelp of surprise as she suddenly found herself horizontal.  All the same, she did not fight the motion terribly hard.  
"I think—" but it was difficult to make out his words, when they were muffled by the curve of her neck, interpunctuated with perfect teeth sinking into her flesh, "—that you ought to consummate the marriage now, and worry about the groom later."  



End file.
